Part 3 — The Brass Key
The tape had cut off at the word “underside,” and sixty people in the VFW hall were still holding their breath.
Old Gordon, who had run that tape deck for thirty years, pushed back his chair and walked to the shelf beside the stage. He tipped the machine up on its side with both hands.
Taped flat to the bottom, gone brown with age, was a small brass key and a card in blocky pencil. “Ellis. Box 212. Cheyenne Federal Credit Union.”
Marla said the key proved nothing. Gordon said it proved Cyrus had thought about where a brother would look first.
The second song on the tape was only a few seconds long. It was Cyrus clearing his throat and saying, “That is the last of it, Ellis. Go see Dolores at the credit union. Tell her Red River Valley sent you.”
My wife Joyce took my arm and did not say let her have the noise. She said, “Let us go and see.”
Monday morning Dolores brought out a long steel box and left us alone with it.
Inside were three things: the payable-on-death signature card in my name, the statement showing fifty-one thousand, three hundred and fourteen dollars, and a pawn ticket book with a note on it.
The note said, “Pawn dealers must log every item they buy. When Marla sells my harmonicas, the dealer will have a record. Ask him for it.”
I drove to the pawn shop with the note. The dealer, a tired man named Pruitt, pulled out his ledger without argument. Forty harmonicas, sold for six hundred dollars, every one described by maker and key.
Pruitt said the law required him to hold items for a period, and every harmonica was still in a back drawer, unsold.
I bought them back for what Marla had been paid, and I counted them on his counter. Forty, and the case.
The credit union released the account to me with a certified death certificate and my own ID. The will never entered into it, just as Cyrus had said.
Marla came to my garage a week later. She gave me his truck keys, his debit card and the Bible, and she asked whether I could ever forgive the fire pit. I told her I would try, and that Cyrus would have wanted her to have the photographs, which I had kept safe.
She nodded and left without a word.
The following Saturday, the VFW held a true memorial jam. Forty harmonicas sat in a row on the stage, and every veteran who could hold one took a turn.
At six on Sunday I sat in my garage with the Hohner and played Red River Valley into a silent phone, all the way to the last note, and I did not hang up.